The Man in Lower Ten eBook

“I didn’t think anything,” I hastened
to assure her. “I tell you, Alison, I
never thought of anything but that you were unhappy,
and that I had no right to help you. God knows,
I thought you didn’t want me to help you.”

She held out her hand to me and I took it between
both of mine. No word of love had passed between
us, but I felt that she knew and understood.
It was one of the moments that come seldom in a lifetime,
and then only in great crises, a moment of perfect
understanding and trust.

Then she drew her hand away and sat, erect and determined,
her fingers laced in her lap. As she talked
the moon came up slowly and threw its bright pathway
across the water. Back of us, in the trees beyond
the sea wall, a sleepy bird chirruped drowsily, and
a wave, larger and bolder than its brothers, sped up
the sand, bringing the moon’s silver to our
very feet. I bent toward the girl.

“I am going to ask just one question.”

“Anything you like.” Her voice was
almost dreary. “Was it because of anything
you are going to tell me that you refused Richey?”

She drew her breath in sharply.

“No,” she said, without looking at me.
“No. That was not the reason.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

ALISON’S STORY

She told her story evenly, with her eyes on the water,
only now and then, when I, too, sat looking seaward,
I thought she glanced at me furtively. And once,
in the middle of it, she stopped altogether.

“I will turn my back, if it will help any,”
I said stormily, “but if you expect me to look
anything but murderous, why, you don’t know
what I am going through with. That’s all.”

The story of her meeting with the Curtis woman was
brief enough. They had met in Rome first, where
Alison and her mother had taken a villa for a year.
Mrs. Curtis had hovered on the ragged edges of society
there, pleading the poverty of the south since the
war as a reason for not going out more. There
was talk of a brother, but Alison had not seen him,
and after a scandal which implicated Mrs. Curtis and
a young attache of the Austrian embassy, Alison had
been forbidden to see the woman.

“The women had never liked her, anyhow,”
she said. “She did unconventional things,
and they are very conventional there. And they
said she did not always pay her—­her gambling
debts. I didn’t like them. I thought
they didn’t like her because she was poor —­and
popular. Then—­we came home, and I
almost forgot her, but last spring, when mother was
not well—­she had taken grandfather to the
Riviera, and it always uses her up—­we went
to Virginia Hot Springs, and we met them there, the
brother, too, this time. His name was Sullivan,
Harry Pinckney Sullivan.”